Combating Referral Spam in Google Analytics

We all know the feeling. You log in to Google Analytics to see how your website has performed this week, and lo and behold, you’ve got more traffic than before. Much more! Then you get to the source/medium report and see that the increase came almost entirely from referral traffic. Did you get a new backlink? Did all those Twitter posts finally pay off? Then you start to browse the sources and the sparkle fades from your eye. You’re the latest victim in a new epidemic of “referral spam”.

Referral spam, also known as “ghost referrals” is the newest way advertisers have found to promote their sites to marketers and website owners. Using bots to fake hits in your Analytics account, they are able to force their way into your Google Analytics report and tempt you to visit their websites. It must be working, because over the last 12 months the problem has escalated to the point that these fake hits are greatly skewing the data in almost all Google Analytics accounts. Here’s what this looks like:

The kicker is that these bots don’t even need to visit your website to trigger these fake hits. Once they get a hold of your Google Analytics property ID number (Something like “UA-123456-1”) they are able to send URLs into your reports by executing the tracking code on their own servers. They can spam hundreds of hits from various websites into your account in mere hours.

If you get a lot of traffic already, this may not skew your reports too greatly. For some smaller websites, however, this traffic can account for almost ALL of the sessions in your account. These hits often leave behind a trail of destruction, identified by 0% new sessions and a 100% bounce rate.

So how do you get rid of them?

To prevent this traffic from appearing in your reports, you can create filters on your account that list the domains you don’t want to count towards your totals. An example filter for one of these sites might look like this:

This filter will block all of the referral traffic from this domain moving forward – not retroactively. So next time you check your traffic, you wont see this domain. Unfortunately, you’ll probably see about 100 more domains that you didn’t filter. It’s a never ending game of whack-a-mole, and as soon as you stop playing, the spammers win.

An automated solution

To combat the seemingly endless supply of spam websites that will continue to pop up, Anchor Metrics created a tool that adds filters to your Analytics account in bulk. With over 320 sites in our database at the time of this writing, we’ve compiled the most comprehensive list of spam domains that we’ve found. We’ve pulled in lists from blog posts, other similar tools, and our own experience to put together filters that eliminate all known spam domains from your sites. We also work with the folks at SpamScape.net, who devised a way to algorithmically detect this spam ongoing.

To use the tool, head over to http://gaspamfighter.com and link up your Google Analytics profile. Select an account and the sites you want to filter (by default, we’ll filter all of the sites we know about). Click go, and the tool will create 20+ new filters that cover all of the sites in the database. You can use this on as many GA accounts as you need, although there is a daily limit imposed by the Google Analytics API.

A week later, you’ll have some new spam sites appearing (they are vigilant, those spammers!). When that happens, head back to the GA Spam Fighter and run the tool on your account again. We’ll automatically detect the filters you already have applied, determine if there are any new sites to filter, and add a filter with any sites you haven’t blocked yet. It’s just like updating the firewall on your Google Analytics account.

With any luck, Google will come out with a native feature that takes care of this for us (What does that “Exclude known bots and spiders” button do anyway?!). But for now, we hope the GA Spam Fighter can help you clean up your data and get back into the useful data we all rely on.

About Anchor Metrics

Anchor Metrics makes tools for digital marketers. Their digital marketing dashboard offers rank tracking, review monitoring, and integrating reporting from AdWords, Analytics, Search Console, social channels, and more. You can schedule PDF reports, or create a white-labeled portal for your clients to access 24/7. If you’d like to learn more about Anchor Metrics, visit the site.

Wow, I had no idea this issue was so prevalent. I think I’ve seen this with my website — lots of traffic out of nowhere! Thanks for the tips; I’ll try using the filters and tools to see if they’ll help.

John Carlsen

Interesting idea about how to get rid of the spam. I’m definitely using this service! Thanks a lot!

Becky Brooks

Now I know why all the paid to write sites have gone out of business. I wonder if this could help them?

coolsoup12

Excellent information I learned a great deal from this article.

Nico Capparelli Sanabria

Very informative article in regards of getting rid of spam. Well written and will be useful in the near future. I’ll definitely be using this soon.

I hear ya. We did put out quite a bit of requests for feedback (most non-paid) and made it clear that we preferred feedback from those interested in technology. We also asked for genuine feedback, not just “leave a comment”.

Paying for feedback is critical to improvement, which is why folks like us use services such as usertesting.com and surveymonkey.com. I’m pretty sure Google also allows you to pay for feedback through their service, oh yah, here: https://www.google.com/insights/consumersurveys/home

I’m with you on the ones who accepted the task despite the request for relevant technology folks though, and I definitely appreciate the feedback.

Maulik Kothari

Wow! I absolutely loved this article. I am an IT professional and i am definitely planning to consider the suggestions provided here.

Rich Pirrin

I like the analogy that was made, “It’s just like updating the firewall on your Google Analytics account”. Very useful tool. I plan on using it!

Edward Tivrusky

Nice, there’s nothing worse than the drop from excitement to despair that you described. Thanks for the filter and tool advice!

Jtemo

I’ve experiences a similar thing on Facebook – where people who have pages in the related category to my own I get the ‘fallout’ from all their fake traffic.

The problem is now I have a bunch of redundant likes and have to pay EVEN MORE to get my posts to reach an actual person who wants to see my content. Hate the whole thing! Glad you shared some tips on how to counter this!

That is great that filters can be added in bulk. What a great idea. I plan to use this information in the future.

simon weild

I think this is a good idea. Spam is a big problem online.

Amine Allaoui

I’ve never thought of using filter in my website especially when I get some decent traffic. I’m glad that they are people like you who are willing to share amazing tips to help people improve, I will definitely give it a go.

Priyr

This is great idea. I liked it and there was nothing to dislike. Thanks for this tips.

Richard Harris

Some very interesting statistics here. Thanks for the useful information.

Trixie

If these are called ghost referrals does that make you the ghost referral buster? 😉 Anyway, the article really helped thanks for writing it.

I didn’t know how to get rid of the spam. Till now. Thank you for an article. I’ll try to use your advice !!!

travis tiernay

I hate Spam, This is helpful!!

Burt Price

This sounds like very good advice.

Aminur Aminur

This is amazing tips to help people improve, I will definitely give it a go. Thank you for an article.

Christine Wenger

It is nice to know that are filters available to get rid of spam. It certainly is becoming a large scale and annoying problem.

John May

I really hate spam. I am so glad for this article because now I can avoid getting spam! Thanks.

Nick Smith

I would have never thought that Google Analytics could be spammed, I wonder that is Google doing about this? The tool by Anchor Metrics will be very helpful and I shall consider using it.

Mike Steelreaper Stoker

I must try out this tool. Spam can be a really annoying problem.

Sam Ross

I think for every good thing that is invented there is another that comes along which has to ruin and spoil it.Anchor Metrics looks a very interesting idea and can deal with this misery very easily , i will be looking at this again closer in the future.